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So, we’re still looking at the UK passing laws preventing access to adult content online, and the ridiculousness of this farce is growing.
No doubt some of you will remember that many questions were being asked about how exactly this system would roll out, who it would cover, how it would be done, what it would entail etc. As most of you know, it’s a pointless knee-jerk scheme that won’t actually have any impact on minors accessing adult content, the only thing it will do is damage adult business and increase the costs for producers – and potentially affiliates also.
How is this becoming more of a farce?
They’ve set a deadline for April 2018, but they haven’t even ironed out any of the basics.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40630582
What has been written so far is basically “we’re going to block porn and make people use credit cards as a form of ID to access even free sites”
That’s really it, nothing else. They haven’t even started looking at how pointless and impossible this task it, and they now have less than a year to work out:
1. How they block international sites.
2. Whether affiliates and bloggers are required to create a credit card firewall.
3. How they’ll stop adult content from being viewed on Twitter, Tumblr etc.
4. What services will be used to confirm ID.
5. What punishment there might be for those who break the law.
6. What motivation there is for business to not just move their servers overseas.And many, many more problems.
Obviously, we all knew this was a failed knee-jerk response to pressure from groups who don’t want to take any responsibility for raising their own kids. We all know that this is not going to work, and people have tried to tell them that over and over again.
This is what happens when you have a bunch of technologically illiterate people in power looking for any opportunity to make themselves look busy, and being handed the means to do it by near fanatical pressure groups who don’t really care about the cause they claim to represent, to them it’s just another way to achieve censorship of something they don’t like.
The problem is, they seem determined to waste time and money pushing ahead with this batshit crazy plan regardless of all the professionals telling them it cannot be done. So, I think we can expect them to implement a mess of legislation, out of desperation, then watch it all come apart just as everyone with half a brain told them it would.
Your thoughts?
I did see the news about this today as well. As you say there is absolutely no information on how it will be done, what sites needs to do.. the only hint is that sites will get blocked and companies offering services to blocked sites would get penalised or something.
ATVOD which was the predecessor got shut down after costing too much money with no result. I’m wondering if with all the cuts the UK is having to do and with the economy going down the drain with Brexit, will they actually have the money to fund a department with enough staff to effectively police anything like this? There are millions of sites out there after all and just finding the owners, contacting them.. is a lot of work. And would they actually have any jurisdiction at all over sites based outside the UK?
This is probably one of those you just have to sit tight, wait and see what happens. It would make sense the big guys would be hit by anything before the smaller sites, like pornhub, xhamster etc.
If something like this was rolled out internationally then I could see it working and being a good idea. It would kill free porn and also the tube sites would suffer quite a lot, and it would push viewers back to porn sites. So I think it could actually benefit the industry quite a lot.
How the UK on its own will enforce it, who knows. I guess sites can setup to detect where a user is signing up from and then change the join page accordingly.
That’s why I think they’ll push it for as long as they can and then fail. They have no plan that anyone can see (just like Brexit, ironically) and as you say it’s going to cost a fair chunk of money.
My concern is that whoever is pushing for this in the government already has their investments worked out. We all know how it goes. They find a method to spend public money on a fake “need”, then those close to the decision-making get their partner to go out and buy up stock in whatever company they know they’re going to give the contract to.
I will not be at all surprised when we find out that the lobbying group behind this has created a brand new start-up to sell card checking services in the UK for this purpose, and that those on the board making these decisions have all invested money in it.
They’re pigs with their snouts deep in the trough.
It can’t be done internationally though.
Just like banking, the moment you put in a restriction another country starts attracting all the business.
So, just like the UK is about to find out with businesses fleeing the country for a European base after Brexit, you’re either working on a (semi) level playing field internationally or you lose out to countries with fewer obstacles.It’s not going to work, but they’re probably going to line their pockets with a few million ?’s before they give up on this stupidity.
Long before many of your time in the early aughts, AVS (Adult Verification Services) were the money makers of the adult business. Users bought passes for MANcheck, UGAS, or Global Male Pass, or a dozen others, which claimed to keep content away from the eyes of minors.
Everything was going swimmingly, we were all getting rich until one day VISA got wind that AVS sites were using their credit cards to verify people were adults. VISA didn’t like that because not everyone who has a credit card or has use of one is actually adult. They banned the practice and over night an entire business model fell apart.
Now, 14 years or so later, the British government is planning on doing the same thing and VISA is okay with it I guess.
Oh, I’m old enough to remember the AVS pages popping up whenever you clicked a link.
I also remember that there were plenty of sites out there with no protection. There used to be thousands of free groups all over Yahoo and the like with stolen pics.
I don’t think VISA are okay with it. In fact, I can’t imagine any company is going to be okay with it. The security risks for their customers will be dramatically increased.
It would be a matter of hours before someone in Russia started building fake UK adult sites ready to start harvesting credit card numbers.
The way I see it there’s only two ways this could be done:
1. An outside company builds the infrastructure, the database, the payment system and the implementation methods for thousands of UK sites and runs it at a profit. That’s going to take at least a couple of million of investment.
2. The UK government invests a couple of billion quid to build a massive payment system themselves, their own servers and their own systems.Neither of these can be done. No outside company is going to risk millions of $’s for something that’s already proven to be pointless. The UK government is not going to invest billions in building the system and maintaining it.
But, when they finally reach this inevitable conclusion and discover that what they imagine in their prudish little heads cannot be done, will they give up on it, or will we just see blunt censorship being used instead?
